UNEARTHLY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does unearthly mean? 

• UNEARTHLY (adjective)
  The adjective UNEARTHLY has 2 senses:

1. concerned with or affecting the spirit or soul

2. suggesting the operation of supernatural influences

  Familiarity information: UNEARTHLY used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• UNEARTHLY (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Concerned with or affecting the spirit or soul

Synonyms:

spiritual; unearthly

Context example:

unearthly love

Similar:

unworldly (not concerned with the temporal world or swayed by mundane considerations)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Suggesting the operation of supernatural influences

Synonyms:

eldritch; uncanny; unearthly; weird

Context example:

he could hear the unearthly scream of some curlew piercing the din

Similar:

supernatural (not existing in nature or subject to explanation according to natural laws; not physical or material)

 Context examples 

You—you strange, you almost unearthly thing!

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

I don't know what it was, in her touch or voice, that made that song the most unearthly I have ever heard in my life, or can imagine.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Bless my soul, what unearthly prudence!

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

It was a long poem of six or seven hundred lines, and it was a fantastic, amazing, unearthly thing.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

I approached this tremendous being; I dared not again raise my eyes to his face, there was something so scaring and unearthly in his ugliness.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

We lay in the midst of an unearthly quiet, while all about us were signs and omens of oncoming sound and movement.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

All at once there began the most horrid, unearthly screaming, which at first startled me badly, though I had soon remembered the voice of Captain Flint and even thought I could make out the bird by her bright plumage as she sat perched upon her master's wrist.

(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

I was aware also that I should often lose all self-command, all capacity of hiding the harrowing sensations that would possess me during the progress of my unearthly occupation.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

I did feel, sometimes, for a little while, that I could have wished my wife had been my counsellor; had had more character and purpose, to sustain me and improve me by; had been endowed with power to fill up the void which somewhere seemed to be about me; but I felt as if this were an unearthly consummation of my happiness, that never had been meant to be, and never could have been.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Other models failing her for a time, she undertook to cast her own pretty foot, and the family were one day alarmed by an unearthly bumping and screaming and running to the rescue, found the young enthusiast hopping wildly about the shed with her foot held fast in a pan full of plaster, which had hardened with unexpected rapidity.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)